Network alignment

Abstract

Complex networks are frequently employed to model physical or virtual complex systems. When certain entities exist across multiple systems simultaneously, unveiling their corresponding relationships across the networks becomes crucial. This problem, known as network alignment, holds significant importance. It enhances our understanding of complex system structures and behaviours, facilitates the validation and extension of theoretical physics research about studying complex systems, and fosters diverse practical applications across various fields. However, due to variations in the structure, characteristics, and properties of complex networks across different fields, the study of network alignment is often isolated within each domain, with even the terminologies and concepts lacking uniformity. This review comprehensively summarizes the latest advancements in network alignment research, focusing on analysing network alignment characteristics and progress in various domains such as social network analysis, bioinformatics, computational linguistics and privacy protection. It provides a detailed analysis of various methods’ implementation principles, processes, and performance differences, including structure consistency-based methods, network embedding-based methods, and graph neural network-based (GNN-based) methods. Additionally, the methods for network alignment under different conditions, such as in attributed networks, heterogeneous networks, directed networks, and dynamic networks, are presented. Furthermore, the challenges and the open issues for future studies are also discussed.